About Marginalia

What this is

Marginalia is a demonstration shop. Twelve products, three stockists, a catalogue a machine can read, two policies, a wholesale enquiry form and a sale that has not started yet. Everything here was built through the Quilzo admin interface — no configuration files were edited, and no code was written for it beyond one HTML template and one stylesheet.

How it is put together

The products are records in a collection, which is what makes the shop page sortable, the range page filterable, and the catalogue feed possible — all three are the same query mechanism, not three systems kept in step. The price is a number, because a price stored as text cannot be compared by anything. Availability is a closed choice, so “sold out”, “Sold Out” and “out of stock” cannot become three states that mean one thing.

The stockists are pages with a content type, so one missing a city is refused before it is stored. The sale is a page carrying a publish window: it is not on this site yet, and no scheduled job is responsible for that — the window is checked when the page is asked for, so it cannot be late, and it cannot be early either.

The claims are gated. The brass pen promises a five-year warranty and publishes, because the product carries a link to the terms; take that link away and publishing stops, naming the sentence and the field that would make it sayable. The correspondence cards make a recycled-content claim and publish, because the certification is linked. That check runs over the records and not only the pages, because in a shop the copy that matters is a record.

This page is subject to the same rules, which is why it describes those sentences rather than quoting them: the first draft quoted both, and the gate refused to publish the page explaining the gate. That is the control working on its author, and it seemed worth leaving in.

What is deliberately missing

There is no cart, no checkout, no payment and no stock reservation. Shopping agents in 2026 discover products and hand the purchase back to the merchant, so what a shop needs from a CMS is a catalogue that says what is for sale and where to complete the purchase. The moment this took an order it would need credentials it does not have, and implying otherwise would make this demonstration dishonest.